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Employee paid leave bill to be heard

Senate Bill 188 would establish state-administered program

By Geoff Baumgartner

The Fort Morgan Times

Posted:
03/11/2019 08:58:41 PM MDT

The eyes and ears of small-business owners around Morgan County and the state will be tuned to the Senate Business Labor & Technology Committee when Senate Bill 188, creating a family medical leave insurance program, comes up for a hearing and possible vote this week.

Democrats introduced the bill last Thursday that would give working Coloradans paid leave to care for a newborn, receive treatment for a major illness, leave a relationship marred by domestic abuse or help a family member who is sick or dying.

The state would administer the program, much as it does unemployment insurance, and employees and employers would contribute equally toward it. All full- and part-time workers and businesses of any size would have to participate.

The bill would create a paid family leave system through the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. Every employee and every business would contribute weekly to a state-managed fund that would approve people's claims and pay them out. People who are self-employed could opt into the plan, but no one working for someone else could opt out.

"No one opposes paid family leave. Many of our members already offer the benefit," said Tony Gagliardi, Colorado State Director of National Federation of Independent Business in a statement to The Times. "What our members oppose is a government mandate that assumes every business of any type or size can afford to offer the same benefits as large companies offer their employees."

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The costs would be split evenly between employers and employees and would total 0.64 percent of a person's annual income. This would mean a person earning $50,000 per year would contribute $160 annually or about $3 per week. The employer would do the same.

Those payments would guarantee the worker a paid leave benefit that is a percentage of their weekly salary for 12 weeks. The benefit would be offered beginning in January 2022.

"Small-business employers are not equipped to have an employee gone for up to 12 weeks and be required to hold the position open, which Senate Bill 188 would force them to do," Gagliardi said.

"They will be required to pay 50 percent of each employee's premium to run the state program," he continued.

The bill directs CDLE to calculate the average weekly wage in Colorado each year and then use that amount as its baseline. People who earn that amount or below would get 90 percent of their wages. People who earn more would get 90 percent of the average wage plus 50 percent of their salary above that.

No one could collect more than $1,000 a week.

"NFIB members come from every sector of the economy and every industry imaginable with the average member having between 5 and 9 employees; how does a small business cope when a worker is absent for 12 weeks?" Gagliardi asked.

"The sponsors of Senate Bill 188 expect the owner to absorb the loss and pay the worker on top of it," he stated.

Employees would also be guaranteed they can get their job back by filing a complaint with CDLE or suing their employer. That would be portable from job to job because the only requirement for getting paid is that a person worked 680 hours during the previous year.

"When you hear stories of people taking their parents off life support from their break room because they can't be there and mothers struggling to come back to work after two weeks and cancer patients that have skipped their second round of chemotherapy because they can't afford to lose their paycheck, it's heartbreaking," said Sen. Faith Winter, D-Westminster, co-sponsor of the bill.

Four previous iterations of paid family leave have failed in recent years because of concerns from Colorado Republicans and moderate Democrats about the ways it could impact businesses.

Sen. Angela Williams, D-Denver, opposed previous versions of the bill, but is a co-sponsor to the current legislation.

"I took time during the summer to meet with small businesses in my district and across the state to talk about the impacts to the operations of their businesses in the event someone needed to take 12 weeks off," Williams said.

"Advocates insist that paid leave is good for business because workers will be happier and more productive. When our members, who are real business owners, tell us they can't afford to offer the benefit, it is because they can't afford the benefit," Gagliardi concluded.

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